
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993                   TAG: 9309200266
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHAT'S WITH NORTH CAROLINA?

The big cities in North Carolina have increased their citizens' income much faster than their Virginia counterparts. Now those cities rank as the most affluent in the region, especially Raleigh-Durham. In 1950, Raleigh's median family income was 9 percent below the national average. In 1990, it was 22 percent above.

What's going on in Carolina?

"The North Carolina cities really came out of nowhere," says Joseph Persky, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied incomes in the South. He traces North Carolina's rise to the early 1960s, and a series of progressive governors committed to economic growth. "I would agree the politics of the state has had an effect," Persky says. "There was a conscious effort to build up the Research Triangle. There were worker training programs. There was a more aggressive attitude toward not just high-tech jobs, but improving the whole labor force."

While a state government committed to spending big bucks to promote economic development may have made a big different, there may have been other factors that are harder to duplicate.

North Carolina relaxed its banking laws early to allow statewide banking, so when interstate banking came, its banks were bigger than those in neighboring states - so First Union and NationsBank, both headquartered in Charlotte, became predators rather than prey.

David Rusk, a Washington urban consultant, also says North Carolina's geography helped spur growth, because the state's major cities are so close that some of them eventually grew into a single economic unit.

"One of the things that has not happened in Virginia is there was a cohesive geography in North Carolina along the whole Interstate 85 corridor," Rusk said. "The cities linked up fairly rapidly within economic regions and then the regions interacted with one another. Raleigh/Durham and Greensboro/Winston-Salem constitute a pretty significant phalanx. Virginia doesn't link up like that."

Virginia does have an emerging urban corridor between Northern Virginia and Richmond and between Richmond and Tidewater. But Roanoke is usually left out competely, Rusk says.

Wilbur Zelinsky, a renowned cultural geographer at Penn State, says North Carolina's economic growth is rooted even deeper, in the Tar Heel state of mind.

"The North Carolina cities have a number of things working for them not found elsewhere in the South," Zelinsky said. "You have to go deeply into the social psychology of the region, the fact that it was not so involved in re-fighting the Civil War as Virginia and South Carolina. A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit it was called. That made North Carolina more forward-looking, ready for the Research Triangle, not so hidebound."

by CNB